“If it’s useful for people, it’s available for them to use,” says Valve boss Gabe Newell during a recent roundtable discussion. “For us, it’s insanely useful – it does exactly what we need an engine to do and it’s evolving in the directions that we think are important. It’s kind of an industrial-strength solution. For our developers it works great, for other developers it’s not nearly as useful as Unity. So it’s sort of like, it’s here if people want it.”

Valve are working on getting it to the point where they can offer it out for developers, but their own projects are coming first. It’s just not taking priority at the moment.

“We view it as a tool,” he explains. “It’s part of Steam, and there are lots of things on Steam that are useful to developers and other things that aren’t. It’s not a way to make money for us, it’s something for developers to look at and think ‘wow, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do’.”

It may become more useful over time, of course. Perhaps Valve will need to solve a VR-specific problem for their own developments, leading for that to be added to the engine. That’s when it will start being a viable alternative to traditional game engines. Check out the full interview in the video above.